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For 60 years, most provincial ferry service was provided by the Canadian Pacific Princess ships which operated on the legendary Triangle service between Victoria, Vancouver and Seattle, and between Nanaimo and Vancouver.
Among the most popular of these vessels was the Clyde-built, 6,000-ton flagship Princess Kathleen which began her coastal career on May 12, 1925.
Read MoreLast Sunday marked the 128th anniversary of the worst streetcar accident in North American history—the collapse of Victoria’s Point Ellice bridge from the weight of a trolley carrying more than twice its legal limit of holidayers. Within minutes, 55 people were dead, 27 injured.
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As we’ve seen, the aged and decrepit steamship Clara Nevada appeared to be doomed from the moment she cleared her Seattle dock in February 1898. But, somehow, bound for the Klondike gold rush with passengers and freight, she managed to make it to Skagway.
A Seattle newspaper termed her safe but eventful arrival as nothing less than a miracle.
Read MorePart I
Honestly, folks, I don’t make this stuff up. I don’t have the imagination. Take this story, for example:
“The Clara Nevada is probably America’s coldest cold case file. It is also the largest robbery in American history, twice the size of the Brink’s Job, and was the largest mass murder in American history until the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995...”
As His Majesty’s Ship Nabob this small aircraft carrier—Canada’s ‘first’ flattop—has gone down in naval history for surviving a torpedo in August 1944 during an attack on the German battleship Tirpitz.
To the amazement of many, and thanks to the heroism of her crew, she made it safely back to port.
Read MoreIt was said of the Eliza Anderson that “no steamboat ever went slower and made money faster”.
Read MoreFrom the craggy shores of Isle Arran they came, five brothers seeking their fortunes in the New World.
Read MoreI’ve long joked that I’ve sunk more ships than Lord Nelson—in print. And I owe that dubious claim, in part, to a lady who, long ago, did me a small favour.
Read More“Sale of the Burrard’s Inlet mill—the sawmill owned by J.O. Smith was sold on Thursday by his creditor’s assignees. It was purchased by Mr. Moody for the sum of $6900.”
Read MoreI've wanted to write this story for years. But I was missing a key element so I set it aside then misfiled it. It's been so long now that I forgot how I happened to learn of it in the first place.
Read MoreIt wasn't long after I began researching B.C. and west coast shipwrecks that I first read of the sinking of the S.S. Islander. The Victoria-based coastal passenger liner had struck an iceberg in Alaska's Lynn Canal during the Klondike gold rush.
Read MoreAs a kid I thrived on shipwrecks--in magazines and books, anyway. Photos in National Geographic and travel magazines of rusted hulks on semi-tropical beaches, underwater scenes of Spanish treasure galleons, and of Second World War naval ships on the sea bottom in the southern Pacific really turned me on.
Read MoreI have no idea what young boys read today. My favourites were Mark Twain (in particular Tom Sawyer which I’ve read a half-dozen times) and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Read MoreOne of my true regrets of having earned my journalistic spurs back in the ‘60s is that newspapers and magazines at the time were mostly black and white. Meaning no, or rarely, colour photos because they were too expensive to process and to print. Meaning that I took 1000s of photos in black and white—and we now live in an age of full colour reproduction!
Read MoreI’m becoming a believer in coincidence. I’d no sooner decided to write about beachcombing and secrets that have been given up—or withheld—by the sea than an article in the Times Colonist caught my eye. Researchers from Universite du Quebec a Rimouski are trying to determine if a letter that washed up in a bottle onto a New Brunswick beach in 2017 is genuine.
Read MoreThe sinking of the American steamship Clallam while en route to Victoria is one of the worst in provincial record. But, more than a century later, there’s so much more to this tragedy than just the date, place and circumstances of her foundering in a storm in Juan de Fuca Strait.
Read MoreNever a week goes by but I receive fascinating emails from both regular readers and from those who track me down online or are referred to me with their queries and, not as common but best of all, offers to share their family histories and scrapbooks. These come from close to home and from afar, two of the most recent and most promising being from the Maritimes and the United Kingdom.
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